Exclusive: Renee Chignell 30 years on
From teen dominatrix to devoted mum: How I turned my life around
Renée Chignell was only 18 when she made her living doing a little bondage and discipline from the spare room of her rented Auckland townhouse. Still only a fresh-faced teen when her middle-aged client Peter Plumley-Walker stopped breathing while shackled to the wall and ceiling in a B&D session gone horribly wrong.
The events of that fateful day in 1989 made her a household name for the worst of reasons.
Almost 30 years later, the woman who introduced New Zealand to the word “dominatrix” in a blaze of sensational headlines can stand completely unnoticed outside an Auckland hotel waiting for Woman’sDay to meet her for a chat.
Understandably, that’s just the way she likes it.
There’s something instantly likeable about Renée, now 47. Her cascading mass of honeyblonde hair is piled high on her head. Her eyes sparkle. Her smile is warm. She talks animatedly about her life in the Bay of Islands, her friends and family, and not least, her son, who lights up her world like a supernova.
Gone is the girl who bowed with shame under the strain of public scrutiny while the most intimate details of her life as a sex worker and dungeon mistress were endlessly reported on.
In her place is a warmhearted middle-aged mum who can look back on her teenage self with a load of regret but also compassion. The kind of understanding that only comes with maturity and perspective.
It’s something Renée has mostly kept to herself for decades, preferring to leave the past where it belongs.
But on July 15, that will change, when the docu-drama she has cooperated with,
MistressMercy, airs on TVNZ 1. It was a chance, she says, to tell the world her side of the story from the very beginning.
And from that very beginning, Renée’s life was difficult. An only child growing up in West Auckland, her parents Ngaire and Con belonged to a nudist club and enjoyed a busy social life. But behind the scenes, their house was a war zone.
“Dad was a hard worker and a good man, but he had a nasty streak,” recalls Renée. “My earliest memory – I was about three – was of walking into the kitchen and seeing what must have been dinner all over the walls, and the floor covered with broken plates. He didn’t hit my mother in the face, but he would do other things. Things I don’t even want to remember. Things that didn’t leave obvious bruises.
“After work, he’d go to the Potter’s Wheel pub in New Lynn, before coming home and finding fault in the smallest of things, like his dinner not being hot enough.
“I would get in the way trying to protect my mother and sometimes take a knock. It was a really confusing childhood. If you took the violence out of the equation, it would have been a very different upbringing. It certainly would have been a lot happier.”
Eventually, her mother fought back, once hitting her husband over the head with a cast-iron frypan. The couple divorced when Renée was 11. She moved in with her mum, going from St Dominic’s Catholic Primary School in Blockhouse Bay to Avondale College and then Lynfield College. Soon after turning 15, she left school for good.
“I can’t even remember why,” she smiles ruefully. “I don’t recall getting in with the wrong crowd. I was an average student, a normal, bubbly teen. I never gave my mother any trouble. But I remember saying, ‘Right, I’m going to earn some money.’”
Renée worked at a petrol station, a gelato shop and a clothing boutique before landing a job at Campbell’s Shoes in central Auckland. It was a specialist shop stocking very small and very large shoe sizes, and a number of “flamboyant, beautiful” transvestites would spend “hundreds and hundreds of dollars” on stilettos.
“I’d never seen a transvestite before,” she says. “It was a huge eye-opener.” One of her favourites was Clare. “She did cabaret and told me she had sugar daddies.”
One day Renée, by then 16, and her friend Monique were on Karangahape Road when they ran into Clare. She invited the girls to tag along while she gave oral sex in a car to one of her regular clients.
“Afterwards, we saw the money exchange. It was quite
a sum. That’s h ’ how h it i started.” d ”
Soon Renée was plying her trade as a sex worker on K Road. “The money was a great lure. I’m quite a sensible person. I don’t put myself in dangerous situations – or didn’t. I made a set of rules for myself and decided to be very businesslike about it.
“Almost all of the guys on the Prostitutes Collective’s ugly-mugs list were young – the ones that would beat up the girls, not pay them ... I thought, ‘I’m not going to put myself in that situation.’”
The plan was to have only older clients and to build up a base of regulars, but one night she broke her own rules.
“This white van pulled up and it was a guy in his 20s, but he was an electrician with his phone number, his name, everything on the side of his van. I thought nothing silly was going to happen because I could identify him.”
The liaison turned nasty, however, resulting in Renée hurling herself out of the vehicle. “I landed on my knees and was quite cut up. It was terrifying. I didn’t work for quite some time after that.”
When she did, she turned to the relative safety of a
massage parlour, then she moved on to a bondage and discipline outfit, The House of Dominance. As a dominatrix, she was “only comfortable with very basic B&D. Seriously hurting people wasn’t for me.”
It was a bonus that the money was better than parlour work and mistresses don’t have sex with their clients. But Renée draws the line at saying she preferred it. “I didn’t enjoy any of it. You stay because the money’s good.”
Ill-fatedunion
Around this time, she met Neville Walker. She was 18 and he was 34, unemployed and generous with his fists.
“We met through a friend,” explains Renée. “From the beginning, I was told, ‘Watch out for him. Be careful.’
“He just wouldn’t leave me alone. One thing led to another and we became in a relationship. I learned pretty early on that I had a mirror image of my father – except worse, much worse.”
Several times, Renée tried to leave him, but he always tracked her down and brought her home. The beatings continued. Feeling trapped, she placed a newspaper ad
as Mistress i Dominique, ii offering f fi “medium” bondage sessions sions out of the spare bedroom. om. Privately, her plan was to save enough money to escape pe to Australia and start a new ew life. life
Soon afterwards, new client Peter Plumley-Walker, 51, arrived for his first session, saying, “I’ve been naughty. I’ve touched little girls. I need to be punished.”
Renée tells, “He wanted to be restrained. He wanted the spanking. He was an experienced slave.”
During the session, while Plumley-Walker was restrained against the wall in shackles and with a collar around his neck attached to a chain from the ceiling, Renée left the room. “It was something I often did. It increased the tension – is she coming back?”
On her return, PlumleyWalker was slumped forward, not breathing. She cut him down and Neville tried CPR to no avail. On the one hand, Renée wanted to call an ambulance. On the other, she reasoned, “How are we going to explain this?”
“I simply didn’t know what to do. I was panicking, scared out of my wits, thinking, ‘Wake up, wake up!’”